Executive Coaching VS Mentoring

Executive Coaching VS Mentoring

What is an executive made off? A soul with a foresight? A continuously learning human machine? A benchmark of emotional intelligence? The spearhead of personal and organisational developments? A strategic thinker? An informed decision maker?

Technically, an executive is all of them in a single entity.

I bet, there are many more attributes which integrate with each other to mother a true executive. But, without the proper coaching or mentoring it’s hard to conglomerate all of these virtues within a single mind. Undeniably, only a guided past can breed a successful future. That’s why tailor made programs like leadership development, CEO coaching and executive coaching are experiencing a meteoric rise in their global demands.

Now, you are an executive, and you need this kind of developmental guidance. So, what it’s going to be? A coach or a mentor?

So, you are in dire straits. The undefined and misunderstood needs of yours are still oscillating your fickle mind between ‘a coach’ and ‘a mentor’. Right? Admittedly, “executive coaching vs. mentoring” is one of the highest searched topics on Google. So, the riddle is valid, and it’s widely spread issue.

So, how to combat this expensive battle?

Let’s dig a bit deeper.

Are coaching and mentoring interchangeable when your personal or organisational development is getting blunt? No. They are not the same but they are not completely different either. They do fall somewhere in between. Supportingly, Thechrysallis, one of the coveted organizations in the executive coaching and development niche, says that the demarcation line between a coach and mentor is not thin and there are elemental differences between them.

What’s that?

A mentor is a long term friend.

Starting with the mentors, the relationship between a mentor and his mentee is a long term one. A mentor directs his mentee. A mentor teaches his mentee. A mentor advises his mentee. Now, these are long term parameters and these needs to get cultivated for obtaining a sustainable growth both in the organizational and personal development context.

Mentoring is like a continuous exchange of knowledge between to different experience levels. Mentoring is like wrapping up the loose ends of a less experienced colleague and enhancing his capabilities gradually. It’s a continuous monitoring system that watches you and helps you when you need it.

Nowadays, most of the organizations in the project management or leadership development leverage mentoring to aid their officials when they take over a new or a more complex role for their companies. They need this long-term support in order to fight new challenges over a considerable amount of time. Now, a mentor can be a friend, a senior colleague or other informal relationships.

So, who is a coach?

A coach is an assistance for a specific time period.

The objective of coaching is to assist and encourage an executive to achieve a specific set of goals within a specific ( generally short) timeframe. It’s like building a partnership for a short amount of time to shape attitudes, corporate personalities, abilities for doing predictive analysis and similar parameters.

Technically, in coaching, the relationships are more formal and strictly bounded by a set of schedules. Here, meetings are organised, regular and pre-scheduled. Although coaching is not meant to provide a long term and direct solutions still, one can leverage the same to develop his leadership qualities, overall awareness regarding a specific challenge.

So, we can see that there are visible differences between the objective of coaching and mentoring. I admit that there are some similarities in the processing of both, but that doesn’t mean that they are interchangeable when personal and organisational goals are to be growth hacked.

Vandana is co-founder at The Chrysallis. Based in Mumbai. She is Professional Certified Executive Coach (PCC), Facilitator & Motivational Speaker with more than 18 years of industry experience and over 1200 hours of coaching experience, empowering individuals and organizations achieve true potential. As a coach, she helps people improve the performance and quality of life. She has helped number of people find peace, success, clarity, focus and growth. She is also NLP Master Practitioner and has been fortunate to be exposed to 3-4 different International schools of coaching and expertise in ontological coaching.

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